El Morro

You see, some goddess or something lived in this lake, back when it was freshwater, and then she got tired of the place and fled north and took most of the water with her, and now these natives make yearly barefoot pilgrimages down to this muddy hole and dip leaves into the brine and lick them the way you’d lick a lollipop, or something like that, he said, and he continued talking while the desert slid past, slowly, it seemed, because the horizon was so far off and only things that were close zipped by, and she tried hard to avoid looking at the edge of the road, keeping her eye as far out in the desert as possible, letting him go on with whatever subject was at hand. There were four main strands that formed the litany of his thinking. First and foremost was drugs of all forms and types, their histories and medicinal uses, and their abused uses, on which he was even more of an expert—in particular acid, marijuana, and crystal, his favorite topic and his favorite drug. He talked about drugs as they left his cabin, east of Santa Cruz, all the way down the Pacific Coast Highway, through Los Angeles and out to Palm Springs.

On the way through Joshua Tree, where there was nothing but bare land and a few trees, as far as she could see, he shifted course, and began talking about native culture and native history, his words bent and twisted through his claim (false) that he had native blood, just a generation removed, and that he was related to one of the AIM leaders, a total sellout who could be seen on occasion in bit movie roles, one of those silent Indian types, you know, with the furrowed brow and the hawk eyes, who scrutinize the horizon with the slightly bemused expression you get when you’ve been betrayed so many times you’re no longer betrayed. Eventually, he fixed on the Zuni Pueblo tribe (My true passion. I mean that), and went on for hours, his voice light and airy as he altered history to please his ear, until the Zuni were not only worshippers of deep pits, navels (Yes, fucking navels!), in which their souls and histories were prefabricated, but also stargazers who could see the future with ninety-nine-point-nine-per-cent accuracy. He talked about a holy seer named Don Juan. Not the fake one, who had supposedly helped Carlos Castaneda along the road to a cosmic experience back in the sixties (Not! Not! Not! he said, slamming the wheel), but, rather, a true visionary named Juan, a Yaqui elder who really knew his shit. (He wasn’t a Zuni, but, God damn it, he should have been one!) As he continued talking, his voice trapped in the car, she searched the landscape for the proverbial trees and tried to tune out his voice, to reduce his words to background noise, like the slipstreamed air coming through the open window.

He talked about birds, his key obsession being hawks, falcons, and falconry, a subject he seemed able to expound on for long stretches, despite his limited knowledge, theorizing about the homing instinct and the pleasure that birds found in their ability to ride the thermals that bloomed from the desert in the afternoon. He stared out at the road and waxed poetic about the way birds flew, the prowess they exuded, saying, Man, those fuckers home in and find a victim from ten miles up, catching the slightest movement, and then dive sightless, eyes closed against the dust and wind, using pure motion and nothing but motion until they’re right on top of the kill. You’d be hard-pressed to know which side of the story to look at, because it all meets up right there when the bird hits the prey and the prey, which wasn’t anything, man, becomes something, for a second, at least, and then suddenly it’s nothing but a half-dead carcass being lifted into the sky. Let me put it another way. One second some rodent is poking around obliviously in the weeds, and the next he’s being dragged into the sky amid a storm of wings, he said. Then he fell into an unusually long silence—while the desert rolled past, the rubble and sage rough in the setting sun—and she figured he was thinking about his brother, Stanley, who had, according to a story he’d told her back at his cabin in Santa Cruz, during their first night together, met his Maker in the early days of the Iraq war in the form of a wayward Air Force missile, a targeting error. My brother died over there, he’d said. He looked up into the sky and saw it coming. At least for a split second, he knew what was going to hit him, man. You always know what’s gonna hit you. Maybe for only a sliver of a second. But you still know. Every second, there’s a missile ready to strike you in the head.

His fourth topic was more obtuse—at least, she thought so. It was vague, difficult to pin down. When he got started on the fourth topic, as they headed to Tucson (Got a deal to close down there. Business draws me south), she tried to find new, creative ways to avoid listening, putting her fingers in her ears, humming softly to herself, because his fourth topic was her story, and, since he didn’t have much to go on in the way of details, he made up most of it from the few facts she had given him back in California: I’m an Illinois girl, she had explained to him on their first night together. My father was a farmer outside Springfield. He tossed me out of the house. They were in bed, smoking a joint, listening to the wind sigh through the second-growth redwoods. Don’t say another word, he’d said. Don’t say anything else. That’s all I need to hear. I’ll take the story from there. I really mean it. Not another word. I’d rather fill in the blanks. (Right then she had felt herself adjusting to his way of thinking, drawing on her months on the street, finding a place for him among the characters she’d met: junkies who took in a question and sucked on it for a few minutes before giving a response that seemed far off the mark, as if they were responding to whatever you’d uttered by combining it with some other, more weighty problem; meth freaks who’d answered a question before you even finished asking it and then, overjoyed at their precision and their mystic abilities, fell into blank funks of rage when you shook your head or corrected them; lonely drifter girls who spun monologues of torment and grief that were beautiful in their vivid details, evoking high-tension wires singing in the wind, fathers with hard fists and groping fingers, sexual organs against the thigh, confusion in dimly lit parking garages. For example, one afternoon, in the hills above Hollywood, not far from the horse stables at Griffith Park—an occasional snort or harness jangle could be heard—her friend Kimberly had told her a story that included a blurry-eyed trek through the suburbs of Chicago; an Oak Park businessman named Smith who had taken her under his wing for a few weeks; a gang of bikers in South Dakota who’d plied her with drugs and then put her through a gauntlet of hairy legs. I was somewhere out in Utah, Kimberly had said. I was alone. Someone dropped me off out there. The wind was blowing dust up into the sky. Then this thing appeared—I guess you’d call it a dervish. The thing began talking. It told me a story that went like this:

A guy was out walking in the desert one day when he came upon a horse and a dog. The horse gave a whinny. Then another whinny. Then the dog barked at the horse, and the horse gave yet another whinny. As the man got closer to the animals, he found himself able to understand the particulars of this exchange. All this talk of running free, of eating wild grass, of drinking from freshwater lakes means nothing to me, the dog said. I’m waiting for you to talk about hunting a rabbit, about tearing meat from a bone, about blood and gore. And the horse said, I’m sick of hearing about blood and gore. I’m tired of your stories about sniffing out wild muskrats. I’m waiting to hear you talk of wild clover, of fresh juniper leaves. Then the man felt compelled to interject. Meat and grass. What’s the difference? The function of each is to give you life. Without that function, you’re just bones. Then both animals turned on the man. The dog tore at his legs, and the horse drove his hooves into his face. When the man was dead, they went back to their argument.

Kimberly told one dervish story after another that afternoon in Griffith Park, reciting them until they both drifted asleep, only to awaken, later, to bright sun and blue sky and the hard clomp of hooves. Above them, on a string of horses led by a guide, was a group of Japanese tourists taking snapshots of a vista that included Hollywood buried in a bowl of haze, the desert landscape, and two homeless girls, pale and gaunt, huddled on a sheet of cardboard.)

As they drove north from Tucson through the eggplant predawn light the next morning, after he’d closed the deal (Stay in the room. Don’t go anywhere. Don’t think. Don’t talk to yourself. Don’t answer the phone. Don’t pray. Don’t answer the door), his voice turned dreamy and light while he riffed on her story, saying, You spent a summer sleeping on the sidewalk or in cut-rate hotels with other kids who’d embraced a mute acquiescence in a common dream of freedom, a possible salvation in the form of a good time, hanging on an edge of chance that might at any moment give way to complete, abject reality, and it did, man, it did. It gave way to freeways and faceless drivers behind the glare of windshields backed up anxiously near the Hollywood Bowl, watching as you walked by, one more piece of roadside trash sauntering by in the hot sun, making her way down Highland Avenue, wending her way to the Santa Monica pier. That was all that was left when I found you. Everything else was gone, pushed away, because you’d come to realize, no, scratch that, you’d learned through trial and error that your only recourse was to forget your past. You had to forget everything. You had to forget the house back in Springfield. You had to forget your father’s meaty hands. You had to forget the taste of corn. You had to forget the smell of the barn. You had to forget your mother’s wince. You had to forget the fumbling fingers. That was all you had when I found you. Everything else was gone, pushed into the pinhole of the moment. Said moment including the guy who yelled an obscenity at you from his car near the Hollywood Bowl. Said moment including a guy named Lenny, me, who introduced himself to you with a few pointed but polite questions and then offered you a ride, saying he’d get you out of the city and give you a chance to see a few birds, some redwoods . . .

She found a space wide enough between his words, slipped into it, and fell asleep, only to wake to find him drifting off topic for the first time in days, saying, Look over there, to your left is the biggest copper mine in North America. Those trucks you see crawling up those haulage roads—if you can call them roads—are as big as a house, and down there amid that dust those dragline scoopers are ten stories high, with bucket loaders big enough to hold a school bus. There’s all kinds of terror involved in running an operation like that. Each guy carries his own unique fear when he creeps up one of those roads. He puts on the earmuffs, leans into the wheel, and prays to God he won’t be able to hear, because if someone hits a sensitive vein, or digs too eagerly, the ground gives way and the road crumbles. There’s a mine down in South America that comes close in raw output, but it has nothing on this one when it comes to history—because this pit started out as a one-man, pick-and-shovel operation. Whereas the mine down south was located through satellite surveillance and mapped by geophysicists who foresaw everything before a single blade cut the earth, I guess you could say this one started out as a pipe dream, a tiny whisper of hope clawing at the ground for more than fifty years until it found itself the way you see it now, which is to say a canyon so deep that hawks and other birds see it and think, That’s a good spot to drift over for a while, where I can fly level with the land while still securely high. The South American mine is on holy land guaranteed to give payback in the form of some catastrophic event, most likely in a hundred-year-rainfall-slash-flood-slash-mudslide, he said, slowing the car and craning his neck to catch another look at the mine before the road swung to the left, cut along the back side of a town—just a few ramshackle establishments—and then, gaining elevation, entered a deep cut in the stone where they came upon a woman in the middle of the road, dressed in a bright fluorescent vest, wielding an enormous stop sign in one hand and a walkie-talkie in the other.

A fountain of bleached-blond hair cascaded from her watch cap down the shoulders of her canvas coat. She brandished her sign, spoke into the radio, and then came to the car, leaned over, and presented a face: wind-burned and thin, with a scar along one cheek. (That’s a knife scar, she’d explain later. I pad foundation on it in the mornings, but it’s too deep to cover. I got this one on my honeymoon in Tijuana, when my husband showed me his true nature for the first time. Lucky for me, the blade hit my jawbone and gave me a chance to get away. I’ve got a baby back there who can’t be left for long but might do well just having a few days with her grandmother, she’d say in the car, before instructing Lenny on how to handle the road, telling him, Turn hard here, or Turn easy and ease up, Leadfoot, as they gained elevation and bands of snow stretched from the sheer rock to their left all the way to the edge on the right, cutting clean into a vista that was fantastic and grand, stretching, ochre and sunlit, all the way back to Arizona.) But when the lady leaned into the car for the first time, all she offered was a dull, officious face as she told them they’d have to wait another half hour, at least, for the cleanup crew to finish sweeping off the mountain road ahead, and then she returned to her spot and stood holding the sign.

I like that lady, he said, pouring a cup of coffee from his thermos, raising it in a toast to the windshield. That lady out there, that beautiful creature, has endured hour upon hour alone up here at the entrance to the pass because she probably has Zuni blood of some sort—something Indian, I’d say—and a stoic ability to put her woes aside and center in on the moment at hand, to withstand the elements for the sake of some larger vision. I’d guess she has a little brother with cancer, a kid named Kenny, or Johnny, or Frankie, and she’s working traffic control in the hope of bumping up to a better job, driving a sweeper, a cozy warm cab with snow falling outside and a wiper blade clearing a clean swath across the glass. Most likely, she has another brother, an older one, who works back at the copper mine. He didn’t know he was going to spend his life doing that kind of work. But one day he got a call from the mine office and a guy said, We’re ready to hire you, come on down. We’ve processed your papers. And he said, What papers? And the guy said, The ones you put in. And the brother, Bobby or Ronny or Sammy, said he’d accept the job, but he was confused because he hadn’t put in an application. Then his father and his oldest brother, named something like Mike and Mike, Jr., came home from work, washed the dust off their faces, and said, You get any news? He said, Yeah, I got some fucking news. I just got a call from the mine office and I’m being hired, but I didn’t put in papers for a job. I was planning to go down to Tucson for work. And the father and the older brother said, We put the papers in for you. That’s the way it works in this family. And this guy—let’s settle on the name Bobby—couldn’t say no. Bobby felt himself caught in the long history of his family. Past generations had opened up an obligation. So he said, What the hell, and he started at the mine—this was five years ago—and is still there today, knowing that he’ll spend the rest of his life driving a dump, or, if he’s bumped up, operating a shovel, not so much because he’s resigned himself to fate, though that’s part of it, but mainly because when he’s finished each day, his arms aching and his brain rattled from the fear he gets every time he drives one of those ramp roads, he’s too tired to think about reinventing his life. Lenny toasted the windshield again with his coffee while the woman with the stop sign gazed at them, then she carefully laid down her sign, walked over to his window, and said, Mind if I have a sip of that coffee? He offered her the cup, waited for her to take a sip, then held his palm and the pill out the window, and said, How about a little pick-me-up to go with the sip? And she said, Don’t mind if I do, and closed her fingers gently over the pill.

By the time they came down out of the mountain pass, crossed the New Mexico line, and hit the lower elevations, things had switched around. She was in the back seat, doing her best to avoid hearing Lenny, while the lady with the stop sign was in the front seat listening attentively as he talked with delusional precision, saying, I guarantee you’re going to meet my hawk, Jag, because he’s the best motherfucking bird in the world, and the lady laughed and said, I’d love to meet Jag, and he said, That bird’s got intense focus. I mean, he can fly out of my sight, but he always keeps me in his sight, and when he’s ready he’ll dive out of the sky and land on my arm as gently as a feather, and the lady laughed again while outside the car the pines gave way to scrub and brush and the road straightened itself out and sliced the desert into two equally desolate parts. He’s actually above us right now. He’s following along but keeping a discreet distance, he said, and then the lady, trying to get a word in edgewise, said, My husband swore he’d come back to get me. He said he’d come at me with a gun. And he did. He came back one night and stood out on the lawn shouting. He told me to get out there. He told me to be a man, and I told him I’m a woman, and he said that didn’t matter, he was going to treat me like a man. Then he shot out the picture window, and the police came and hauled him away. Now he’s down in the state prison in Winslow. He and a million just like him.

By the time they came out of the mountains and entered the Zuni reservation, Lenny and the lady in the front seat were like two souls united by a mutual need formed back during the two hours they’d spent navigating the treacherous hairpin turns and windblown snow, arguing about how to manage the wheel in a skid. The lady had said, The myth is that you turn into the skid, but up here in these mountains you’ve got no choice but to turn against the skid as hard as you can and hope the wheels help the brakes. Believe me, I know what I’m talking about. I’ve driven this pass a hundred times and I’ve seen what happens to trucks that turn into a skid. They head over the edge. Even the big trucks, and I’m talking about the ones my brother drives, turn into a wad of tin foil when they hit the bottom. . . .

By the time they were down the straightaway and in the heart of the reservation, he and the lady seemed like lovers of a sort, easy in their manner, stopping the car for a roadside picnic (You stay in the car. Get some rest. Leave us be. We need some time alone, he whispered), sharing a sandwich, passing it back and forth, sipping coffee, talking softly while she watched them from the car. Finally, the best she could do was close her eyes and listen to the sound of their voices, coming through the air as if across a great distance. The best she could do was block their voices by remembering the way the road had felt, suddenly smooth and serene, straightening itself like a magic carpet beneath the wheels after the hours of twisty mountains. When the sound of their voices stopped, she opened her eyes and looked out to see them kissing, while behind them the vast expanse of desert threw itself almost as far as the eye could see, but not quite, because on the horizon, just about lost in the haze, a plateau hunched submissively beneath a huge, vacant sky.

As they passed through a reservation town, the lady in the front seat grew silent, and he took over the conversation once again, saying, They walk a hundred miles to pay their respects to Old Lady Salt, who ran away from Black Rock Lake. She took most of the potable water with her and left behind a useless briny soup. Now they go there once a year and plant their prayer sticks in what’s left of the lake and draw up granules of salt and bag them and take them back home to rim the glasses of margaritas—or whatever the fuck they do with it, man, because it isn’t just salt but something else, even better than salt, he said, and then the lady broke in, saying, My brother loves margaritas. He’s gorgeous, he’s incredible-looking. He’s out in Hollywood. He’s going to be a star. Let me tell you. He really is. He has the gumption. He’s a dreamer. He has stars in his eyes. My big brother gave him shit about it, told him he was delusional, and then he signed him up for a job at the mine. So my little brother went and worked there for a few weeks, until one of the terraces gave out. He was driving a dump and the road just folded away in front of him. He came home that night and told my father he wasn’t fit for that kind of work. He said he had a vision and was going to follow it no matter what, and then he packed up and left. He sends me cards, and I have this picture of him, she said, taking a photo out of her pocket, unfolding it carefully, holding it up into his line of vision so that he could see and drive at the same time. A long, lean face with cool dark eyes and hair slicked back tight against his skull. The boy in the photo was frowning slightly, with his jaw locked tight as if he had bitten something sour. There was remorse, or something that looked like remorse, in his eyes. But there was hope, too. Lenny snatched the photograph from her and said, Yeah, he’s good-looking. He has a bit of Gregory Peck and a hint of Clark Gable and, what the hell, a bit of James Dean, but let me tell you what’s going to happen to him. Let me give you the truth. He’s going to fall onto the streets along with the rest of them and end up holding a spoon over a flame. He’s going to slip into the cracks and you won’t hear of him again until word arrives that his body was found in some empty lot up in the hills, if you’re lucky, or in front of La Brea Tar Pits if you’re not, because no one wants to die in front of a tourist from Wisconsin. No one wants to shatter the congenial blandness they bring, that greenhorn belief in hopes and dreams that settles like the smog and makes it exhilaratingly hard to breathe. And let me tell you, there is nothing better in this world than struggling to breathe. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing, he said, and then the lady began an argument, and the first lively round of bickering began, a tight but somehow still loving exchange that, with the window wide open and her head against the back seat, faded off into nothing more than a pattern of clicks, wooden in nature, continuing until the engine died, and they left her asleep in the car.

She woke to find the neat formality of a clean park, all paved paths and carefully placed signs indicating the names of the trees and the bushes around the huge stone mesa, with a waterfall, gone dry for the winter, just a tongue of mineral deposits starting wide near the top, where a few trees clung, and thinning as it neared the bottom. She got out of the car and started walking. To her left was some kind of visitors’ center, with floor-to-ceiling windows. She could hear his voice floating along a trail and she paused for a moment to look far up the rock face to where trees had sprouted from windblown seeds that had landed in the wrong place at the wrong time, a crack, a crag in the stone, and then, left with no other choice, had grown, bending, angling for the sunlight, finding odd positions, and holding on for dear life. Men came here astonished at the immensity of the stone formation, he was saying when she got within earshot. She stopped on the path and listened. They stumbled here in wonderment. How could something like this rise out of so much flatness? It’s the work of the Devil, some said. The work of God, others said. Obviously they all—and I mean every damned gimp-legged wanderer—felt compelled to make a mark on this thing, he said, pointing to the petroglyphs. To scratch their names, to leave some indication that they had existed. They chiselled, as you can see, carefully—the early ones—and then went off to die of thirst, or to reconsider their failings, or to enslave Mexico, or to be enslaved. Depending on the luck of the draw. Now there are laws against leaving your mark, he said. You can’t even spit on the face of this rock or some guard will emerge from the visitors’ center back there with a club in his hand. I know, because I tried it last time I was here. I marked my name with a pen and ended up incarcerated. He arched his head and held his hand to his brow in a salute against the sun and then turned back to examine the stone, reaching out across the fence as if to touch it, wiggling his fingers in the air. The wind was rising. The sun buried itself in the rubble. He cleared his throat and took a few steps backward, then opened his arms as if to embrace the scene before preparing to speak again. He braced his shoulders and set his feet while the stop-sign lady, to his left, did the same.

No one else was around. The cold had emptied the tourists out. In a firm, hard voice, he spoke directly to the monument of his country’s urgent need for redemption; he spoke of birds who fly in the depths of night skies, trying to find some distant pull of gravity in the darkness, flying wing to wing in V formations; he spoke of forlorn tribes licking salt from their wounds, tenderfooting secretly from one sacred site to the next, searching for some lost part of their history; he spoke of cookhouses in Washington state, tucked deep in the wilds, cranking out pure sacramental salts. Then, while she stood a few yards down the path, listening to his words bounce off the rock, flat and solid, forced into what seemed to be a tight, unavoidable vortex, he turned, pointed, and began to tell her story again, saying, You never dreamed you’d end up in a place like this. You never saw it ending this way. It just didn’t occur to you. How could you dream this up? On the streets of L.A. there just isn’t room for this kind of monument to the past. When you were wandering Sunset, locked in that haze, your capacity to imagine this kind of place just didn’t exist. It took a man like me to get you out of there and to carry you here, he said. And now it’s going to take a man like me to make you really see it in all of its splendor. I’m not trying to grandstand. I’m just stating the facts as I see them. Back on those streets, you dreamed of dogs and cats, of a nice little house. But never anything like this, he said, and his voice grew soft and he whispered something to the stop-sign lady. Then he turned back and said, This is a fitting place to end this thing we’ve had.

Behind the desk in the visitors’ center the ranger—his name was Russell—watched the visitors on the video monitors, scrutinizing the way they moved. A woman with a shock of blond hair hunched her shoulders and rocked on her heels. Next to her, a tall man with stovepipe legs threw fists of gravel into the weeds and stepped with the eager jitteriness he’d seen in punks who came out to vandalize the park, white boys who had lost, or never had, respect for their place in the world. (No, not their place in the world but the reality of the world to begin with.) He liked the view he got on the screens—black-and-white, low quality—how it made folks look all the more ghostly and unsuspecting. An element of desecration was caught by these four cameras: one mounted with a view from the visitors’ center, another on a post in the parking lot. (Campers. People trading drugs, rubbing against each other as they made the exchange. Families stiff from the road, stretching their limbs, rotating their heads and bending over to touch toes. Once or twice a year, a few nuns in habits. Once, two monks, from Vietnam, draped in orange robes. Fellow-Zuni, always recognizable somehow—something in the bend of their legs, the lope of their gait, a slight hunch in the back of the older ones, a confusion of reverence and weariness.) Another camera was on a tree up the path and showed people pausing to examine the monument before it closed in on them. The last camera was on the rock itself—a small unit, wedged in a crag, with a fish-eye lens that spread the image. Years of observing the screens (when he wasn’t out on foot patrol) had given him a pretty good ability to draw speculative conclusions, as he watched people wander across the parking lot, disappear out of view, and then show up, a moment later, on the path. He could spot a vandal in the particular way he put out a cigarette, dropping it to the sidewalk and grinding it. (Vandals smoked. All of them.)

He had watched these two saunter up the path. The punk had spread his arms, opening them wide and holding them out before letting them flop back down to his sides. That gesture had clued him in to the nature of the situation, he later reflected. There was a carelessness in the way the punk had let his arms drop down after opening them to embrace the scene. Whites did that. They seemed incapable of allowing a sustained calm into the way they moved. Meanwhile, on the parking-lot screen, a third figure, a girl, got out of the car alone and looked warily around, trying to get her bearings. Right off, he knew her type: pale, spiritless, with bony hips. A third wheel with unkempt, wind-tangled hair. There was a deliberation—or was it simply exhaustion?—in the way she reached out to touch the plaques as she walked down the path, fingered the branches of the trees, and stopped for a minute to stare up at the stone.

Later, Russell would look back and rehash and reëxamine the way things had transpired, testing his intuitive abilities, remembering how the three of them had stood there—the guy talking, wagging his hands in the air, going on and on, while the woman, the one with blond hair, leaned forward and listened attentively. The girl—the third wheel—stood back, waiting to approach while the guy continued to talk for five minutes, maybe more, moving up to the fence and pointing to one of the markings. (A vandal testing his impulses. The urge to deface seemed evident in his gestures.) Finally the guy turned and addressed the third-wheel girl, talking to her while she shook her head slightly, reaching up to dab a tear or to wipe something from her eye, and then he and the woman simply walked away together, back down the path to the parking lot, where he could see them getting into the car, starting it up, and tearing away, leaving behind a cloud of dust and smoke.

When he got to the girl, she was leaning over the fence, resting her belly on the wood rail, using the leverage of her body to drive a piece of flagstone into the rock, carving out a single line as hard as she could, grunting slightly as her feet lifted up with each clean stroke. One more soul trying to leave a mark in the stone. At least fifteen a year came through with spray cans and indelible markers and attempted, as best they could, to match the elegant demarcations of the past. He’d seen it all. But, stepping around the corner and finding her there, he saw in the delicacy of her action and in the lift of her toes a balletic movement, and he knew something about her that he wasn’t sure how to articulate, so he made his command a bit softer than usual and held his billy club down at his side as he approached. When she turned, he saw the face of a girl who had lost almost everything, including her ability to speak. She kept the mute silence of a soothsayer. He saw that right away. It wasn’t the willed silence of the guilty. Her lips were loose against her teeth, not pressed tight. Her eyes weren’t holding back words. Her eyebrows refused movement. Most in the white world didn’t understand medicine people, he thought, seeing her. (This wasn’t one of the usual irrelevant thoughts that came to his mind when he saw tourists wandering around, gawking, showing disrespect not only for the place they were in but for themselves, too, in the way they walked, wobble-footed, talking too loud and looking too quickly.) In truth, a medicine man never picked his vocation. It was a fate that was bestowed, forcing one to forsake certain pleasures in the world—he thought—in order to become someone who knew a little too much about reality.

She was about as white as you could get, he told his wife. I mean as white as a ghost, junkie-white, with hardly any blood, and that made it hard for me to blame her, to pin the crime on her, so to speak. And, anyway, her sidekicks took off on her. She didn’t look drunk or high and just seemed to need help. He was telling the story in bed, late at night. He knew he was getting to his wife’s heart by telling a good-deed story. She liked it when he told stories that put him in a kind light. He had driven the girl up to Grants and hooked her up with the social worker there and she had promised to get her whatever help was available and a bed in the wayward house for vagrant types—or whatever the hell they call that place, he explained, sighing softly. He lay back and let his wife kiss him and conjured up a clear view of what he saw each day at work, because it had been such a persistent part of his world, for so long, that he saw it—really saw it—only when he was at home, in bed, drowsy with sleep. Then it arose, full-blown, in a vision of grandeur and hope, with the waterfall—in spring—spilling madly down the face of the rock, filling the pool, holding itself against the dryness and the dust.

Just before drifting off, he had one last thought. Maybe he’d keep the mark she had made on the stone a secret and leave it there until the archeologists from Santa Fe, who came in once or twice a year, took notice. Then he’d try to persuade them that it had been there for years and wasn’t worth the trouble of fixing, because the patch material—the limestone-colored compound they used in these cases—would be more noticeable, an eyesore, one more modern distraction for those who came to look. It’s just a scratch, he’d say. A few years of wind and rain will blow it away with all the others. It would go against his good judgment and the strictures of his job and the park itself to lie for her sake, he thought. And with that he fell asleep, carrying with him the monument, his tribal land, and the rest of the world. ♦